This week’s cover story highlights how the founding of SportsEngine Inc. influenced a wave of Minnesota-based companies that all cater to youth sports organizations.
Justin Kaufenberg, SportsEngine co-founder and former CEO, spoke to the Business Journal to elaborate on several points from that story including what makes companies in this sector successful.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What was a moment that influenced the trajectory of SportsEngine?
The big "aha" to us in SportsEngine, and our big pivot early, was when we realized that there were a lot of nice-to-haves in a huge organization, and very few things that were absolutely mission critical. What was absolutely mission critical was the actual flow of financial funds. If you can't successfully allow moms and dads to sign their kids up to participate in sports. If you can't actually collect the payment, process the payment, store the payment, properly route the right amount of funds into the association bank account, then nothing else matters. The organization doesn't exist. SportsEngine was really at its core a fintech, and we ultimately built a bunch of other tools around scheduling and player statistics.
What do companies that work in youth sports need to be successful?
I personally really believe they need to solve a problem that's mission critical, which is where Chris [Knutson], at TeamGenius is doing a great job. To actually solve player evaluations and tryouts and team formation. That has to happen every single year, every single organization must do it. It's a really important thing to get right, because these are kids’ lives that you're deciding — in friendships, in which teams they're on and things like that. They've actually hit a nerve in the sense that they build for a mission-critical issue. There does tend to be a lot of startups that chase some of the nice-to-have areas of sports, and that we think is just less sticky, and ultimately less effective.
What excites you the most about the future of youth sports startups?
I think that the advancement in the actual online toolset themselves has got to the point where you can seriously see volunteers getting their nights and weekends back. We automate more and more of the administrative burden of running a sports organization. Whether that's a SportsEngine to manage finances and operations, or a TeamGenius to manage player evaluations, or a Player's Health that manages insurance. For amateur sports organizations, that's the thing that excites me most. If you can give volunteers their nights and weekends back and let them concentrate on kids and the game, then you're just going to see more parents step up, more parents raise their hand. That's what the sports need. And that's what the kids need. That's the stuff that makes me most excited, like solving that real world problem.
